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Aparna Chennapragada: evaluation

18 May 2025 Lenny's Podcast Microsoft CPO: If you aren’t prototyping with AI, you’re doing it wrong | Aparna Chennapragada

“He's a master at that. And I think on Satya, I find it amazing the appetite he has for learning and fine tuning his mental models and just the zoom levels that he can operate at.”

— Aparna Chennapragada

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Aparna Chennapragada
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
18 May 2025
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Okay, let's link to it. Let's get it out there, open source this thing. Okay. You mentioned Satya, I have a question about this. So you're one of the very few people that have worked very closely with both Satya and Sundar at Google. Let me ask you this. How do their leadership styles differ, and is there just a fun story you could share about each of them? Yeah. I do feel lucky to have a window into these two amazing leaders of this generation. I would say, I mean, again, no surprise as you'd expect from CEOs of multi-trillion dollar market cap tech companies, they are 99.99 percentile in almost every dimension you'd think of intellect, empathy, leadership, product, strategy. There are, of course, flavors of differences. I was the technical advisor for Sundar for the first... At Google and set up the office of the CEO there. And they're, again, a matter of time and context because there's a lot more consumer-oriented focus there. So what I did find Sundar great at it is being really calm and measured and thoughtful in terms of making sure that things have... Dealing with the complex ecosystems. If you think about the phone ecosystem or even the search and publisher and advertiser ecosystem, it's a very complex ecosystem. He was a master at that. He's a master at that. And I think on Satya, I find it amazing the appetite he has for learning and fine tuning his mental models and just the zoom levels that he can operate at. The macro, the strategy, what's the game? Also the micro, "Hey, why are we not..." Here's a specific insight that I saw on Twitter, and you can count on the fact that he's ahead of pretty much everybody else in terms of spotting those early things too. So it's just been learning from the firehose as they put it. What a cool opportunity to work with two incredible folks. Okay, let's go in a whole different direction. Let me just ask you this question that I've been asking people more and more. What's the most counterintuitive lesson that you've learned about building products that goes against common startup wisdom, common product building wisdom.…

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